Its going to be another one of those quick posts again,
This week we had to take the planning of our new shot into blocking using the full Stewie rig. The thought of struggling using no armed Stewie for the last shot didn't fill me full of confidence not to mention I would also have to tackle constraints this time around.
Like I said it was going to be a quick one this week! Heres what I came up with, thanks everyone - Adam
Tuesday 23 August 2011
Sunday 14 August 2011
Special offer! Buy one get one free, Week 6 & 7!!!...
Well the last 2 weeks have been mental! My masterplan for getting ahead in blocking plus in order to give myself enough time to finish my shot the following week backfired. Blocking the spine was an absolute nightmare and I was so keen to get my shot into splined for some reason I just turned off the spine/head visibility and concentrated on the hips/feet.
The real problems became apparent after I had worked on cleaning the hips in spline and then turned the spine/head visibility back on. The hips appeared to flow quite nicely but with the upper body visible the whole lot looked like nothing on earth, they were just not working together correctly.
At this point I felt my workflow had collapsed and the only option was to grind through the animation from here on in. I really was not happy with my shot and it was partly the reason why I didn't post up my work at the end of the week. Heres what I handed in for week 6...
I really was not looking forward to Week 7 as I knew there was alot of work ahead, not only did we have to finish up our shot but we also had to choose and plan for our final shot of the term. Every day of the week pretty much involved going to work at 7am getting home at 6pm then animating from 6pm until 1am in the morning. This really sucked so somedays I went to bed an hour earlier.
For the most part of the week I felt like my shot was just going round in circles, not blocking the spine pretty much ruined me and I must have started from scratch atleast 4 times throughout the week. It seemed like a constant process of tweaking the hips then working on the spine and finding I hade to re-tweak the hips again which in turn screwed with the legs.
Nearing the end of the week I was quite fed up with the whole shot and still had all my planning for my next shot to work on which didn't help, I considered calling my Stickygum shot done with barely no spine animation just so I could work on my next shot and not get behind.
On Saturday morning after work I had a long Skype meeting with my fellow AMer West Decker and it turned out to be the best thing I did all week, he is very well trained in all things that involve time management and motivational stuff from his previous job so he set me a bunch of goals and checked up on me over the next few hours to make sure I was meeting them.
Even though I had hardly touched my shot it seemed to look a whole lot better after my meetings with West, I must have been so consumed in thinking it sucked that I couldn't really see it for what it was. He had totally saved me and cleared my mind in order to focus on what needed to be done.
I handed in my shot Saturday night under orders from West as he knew I would spend every waking hour up until deadline tweaking it and not necessarily for the better. It still needs a whole lot of work as I only really managed to find time to clean up the hips and some of the spine in the graph editor.
I spent today working on the planning for my next shot which is going to be pushing and pulling a heavy object with the full Stewie rig. I struggled terribly with no armed Stewie so I dread to think how this shot is going to play out. We have an extra week this time so hopefully that will help alot.
Other news over the last two weeks is that I have managed to go part time at work for next term which means I will be working around 30 hours a week and have 2 extra days to work on my assignments. I am also hoping to fit some rest time in there aswell.
Another massive thing for me is that I have managed to pay of my AM tuition in full, I took advantage of the USA's financial trouble and when the GBP > USD conversion rate was riding high I sent a whole bunch of Benjamin Franklin's AM's way, this also means I will save the extra $100 processing fee per term. Awesome.
Finally I also installed Maya 2012 on my system for one reason really.... editable motion trails. I am sick of switching through the many arc tracker plugins I have that very rarely work. This was one of the reasons why I didn't manage to clean up alot of this weeks shot.
Anyway heres my final Stickygum shot and the planning for my next adventure, thanks everyone - Adam
The real problems became apparent after I had worked on cleaning the hips in spline and then turned the spine/head visibility back on. The hips appeared to flow quite nicely but with the upper body visible the whole lot looked like nothing on earth, they were just not working together correctly.
At this point I felt my workflow had collapsed and the only option was to grind through the animation from here on in. I really was not happy with my shot and it was partly the reason why I didn't post up my work at the end of the week. Heres what I handed in for week 6...
I really was not looking forward to Week 7 as I knew there was alot of work ahead, not only did we have to finish up our shot but we also had to choose and plan for our final shot of the term. Every day of the week pretty much involved going to work at 7am getting home at 6pm then animating from 6pm until 1am in the morning. This really sucked so somedays I went to bed an hour earlier.
For the most part of the week I felt like my shot was just going round in circles, not blocking the spine pretty much ruined me and I must have started from scratch atleast 4 times throughout the week. It seemed like a constant process of tweaking the hips then working on the spine and finding I hade to re-tweak the hips again which in turn screwed with the legs.
Nearing the end of the week I was quite fed up with the whole shot and still had all my planning for my next shot to work on which didn't help, I considered calling my Stickygum shot done with barely no spine animation just so I could work on my next shot and not get behind.
On Saturday morning after work I had a long Skype meeting with my fellow AMer West Decker and it turned out to be the best thing I did all week, he is very well trained in all things that involve time management and motivational stuff from his previous job so he set me a bunch of goals and checked up on me over the next few hours to make sure I was meeting them.
Even though I had hardly touched my shot it seemed to look a whole lot better after my meetings with West, I must have been so consumed in thinking it sucked that I couldn't really see it for what it was. He had totally saved me and cleared my mind in order to focus on what needed to be done.
I handed in my shot Saturday night under orders from West as he knew I would spend every waking hour up until deadline tweaking it and not necessarily for the better. It still needs a whole lot of work as I only really managed to find time to clean up the hips and some of the spine in the graph editor.
I spent today working on the planning for my next shot which is going to be pushing and pulling a heavy object with the full Stewie rig. I struggled terribly with no armed Stewie so I dread to think how this shot is going to play out. We have an extra week this time so hopefully that will help alot.
Other news over the last two weeks is that I have managed to go part time at work for next term which means I will be working around 30 hours a week and have 2 extra days to work on my assignments. I am also hoping to fit some rest time in there aswell.
Another massive thing for me is that I have managed to pay of my AM tuition in full, I took advantage of the USA's financial trouble and when the GBP > USD conversion rate was riding high I sent a whole bunch of Benjamin Franklin's AM's way, this also means I will save the extra $100 processing fee per term. Awesome.
Finally I also installed Maya 2012 on my system for one reason really.... editable motion trails. I am sick of switching through the many arc tracker plugins I have that very rarely work. This was one of the reasons why I didn't manage to clean up alot of this weeks shot.
Anyway heres my final Stickygum shot and the planning for my next adventure, thanks everyone - Adam
Monday 1 August 2011
Class2, Week5!!...
Another quick post this week, I have a whole load of work to do on my shot and not a great deal of time to do it.
I have to admit working full time and doing AM is starting to get a whole lot tougher recently, I am starting to think I could maybe do better in my assignments if I was to have more time to spend on them.
I know it would definatly relieve some of the stress involved and allow me to experiment a lot more.
I always said to myself before I started AM that when my job started to effect AM something would have to change, I guess it's nearing that time.
I originally thought that I would need to cut back my hours in June at the end of Class1 so I am pretty happy to still be coping up to now. I feel things like this can go both ways and if I end up with too much spare time I know for a fact that I will spend a whole load of it procrastinating and find myself with very little extra time than what I have now.
Its getting that balance of work, AM and rest just right.
I know I have said it before and I might come across as moaning a little about it right now but for anyone thinking about starting AM or already enrolled, I think it would be a huge mistake to not have a job to go to alongside your studies. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
This week we had to block out our second shot of Class2 using the Stewie rig with no arms, as you saw from my planning I decided to go with "Step on sticky gum". I'm not totally happy with how it turned out but the deadline beat me to it, I knew animating a spine was going to be hard but had no idea it was this hard!!.
Anyway heres what I came up with, thanks everyone - Adam
I have to admit working full time and doing AM is starting to get a whole lot tougher recently, I am starting to think I could maybe do better in my assignments if I was to have more time to spend on them.
I know it would definatly relieve some of the stress involved and allow me to experiment a lot more.
I always said to myself before I started AM that when my job started to effect AM something would have to change, I guess it's nearing that time.
I originally thought that I would need to cut back my hours in June at the end of Class1 so I am pretty happy to still be coping up to now. I feel things like this can go both ways and if I end up with too much spare time I know for a fact that I will spend a whole load of it procrastinating and find myself with very little extra time than what I have now.
Its getting that balance of work, AM and rest just right.
I know I have said it before and I might come across as moaning a little about it right now but for anyone thinking about starting AM or already enrolled, I think it would be a huge mistake to not have a job to go to alongside your studies. The advantages far outweigh the disadvantages.
This week we had to block out our second shot of Class2 using the Stewie rig with no arms, as you saw from my planning I decided to go with "Step on sticky gum". I'm not totally happy with how it turned out but the deadline beat me to it, I knew animating a spine was going to be hard but had no idea it was this hard!!.
Anyway heres what I came up with, thanks everyone - Adam
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